Page 428 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
3. Studies of Irony
The existence of irony and appeals to it seem ubiqui- tous. However, linguistic and literary studies make up the vast majority of works devoted to the exploration of irony even though other disciplines do occasionally engage the concept. Most works have focused on the stimulus itself; cognitive-perceptual studies of the connection of the intended message to the literal mess- age arise out of the almost universal attempts to explain irony by exemplifying it. Focusing on the relations of the speaker to the victim or the audience allows discussion of the social-behavioral effects. There are even a few studies that concern themselves with the personal responses of the participants and their psychopathology.
3.1 Irony and Psychology
Theories of psychotherapy usually pay very close attention to language, indeed closest attention to the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. If, as Haley claims, the psychotherapeutic relationship has paradox inherent in it, attention to irony defines the patient, the Socratic stance of the therapist, and the realization of the irony that constitutes progress. It can be argued that psychotherapy is analogous to language, in which a message has meaning only as a context qualifies it; such qualification can be treated as a definition of irony. Indeed, Breuer states that modern literature's pervasive irony is a homeopathic cure for the schizophrenia that results from the mod- ern abandonment of contact between the outer world and our inner selves.
3.2 Irony and Philosophy
The German romantics are usually credited with the first epistemological use of the concept of irony. Both a worldview and its creative representation are driven by this concept that allows for otherwise untenable contradictions. Kierkegaard also finds that irony allows him a privileged position above normal dis- course to speak of philosophical and religious matters. His path to the final religious stage is founded in part on the dialectic of the bifurcate character of irony. Both Hegel and Kierkegaard find that the negative always implicit in irony drives their philosophies of process. A hypostatic concept of irony has been used to organize thought, destroy referentiality, dis- associate the speaker from his audience or even the universe, or associate the speaker with his audience or even the universe in modern philosophy.
3.3 Irony and Literature orRhetoric
The literary study of irony has produced by far the greatest number of works, and every year reveals mul- tiple studies of irony in the works of particular authors or sets of works. The more general works on irony are modest but effective introductions. Muecke has created excellent starting places for the history of the
concept, has presented fine arrays of illustrations of the nature and types of ironies, has represented a limited anatomy of irony, and has given generous indications of the practice of irony in literature. He supplies an effective heuristic for differentiating situ- ational from verbal irony: one need only to finish the linguistic test frames of 'it is ironic that...' or 'he is being ironical about...' Booth attempts to show how irony is transferred from an author to his audience. The explanation is circumscribed by presuming that he is defining an art that expresses the author's inten- tions; he manages to sneak situational irony in by giving it rhetorical force when someone talks about it. While he offers no discovery procedures, he does supply four steps to reconstructing the irony intended by the author: (a) rejection of the literal meaning; (b) exercise of alternative interpretations or explanations; (c) a decision about the author's knowledge or beliefs; (d) the selection of a new meaning or cluster of mean- ings. His rhetoric naturally engages ironies that could be agreed on, stable ironies; unstable, infinitely under- mined ironies are acknowledged at the end of the book, but he feels obliged to salvage even some of them by a leap of faith to the truth beyond the insta-
bilities. Four coordinated essays in a special issue of Linguistique et semiologiques titled L'ironie point toward the range of tentative analytic representations of structural, rhetorical, semiotic, and linguistic issues in the context of developing scholarship.
3.4 Irony and Linguistics
As the linguistic studies of irony have begun to exceed the centuries of taxonomic descriptions, they have begun to analyze the process of irony in interesting ways. Syntactic and lexical descriptions of negation, anaphora, deixis, intonational contours, word order, and the like continue to shed local light on particular examples of ironies. However, it is the pragmatics and suprasentential analyses of the early 1990s that are helping linguistics to add substantially to the theory of irony by taking formal analysis to higher levels. Austin's distinction between literal statements and their intended effects has allowed Grice's con- versational postulates and Searle's rules for inter- preting the illocutionary force of sentences to give the current generation of linguists the tools to begin to discuss the intentions and contexts necessary for a sufficient description of irony. Contextual semantics and script theory suggest how the larger situations of irony might be described. Logical form, discourse analysis, speech-act theory, and artificial intelligence
are currently chipping away at the intractable charac- ter of the roles of values, world knowledge, intentions, and contexts.
Bibliography
Behler E 1981 Klassische Ironie, Romantische Ironie. Tra-
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